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Archive for December, 2016

If this is a realistic left re-emerging, bring it on (it’s a feast of insight and sharp sentences). The conclusion in particular, if a little repetitive, is radically sound:

Under such [impending] conditions, the future of progressive and future-oriented mass politics of the left is very uncertain. […] In a world set on objectifying everybody and every living thing in the name of profit, the erasure of the political by capital is the real threat. The transformation of the political into business raises the risk of the elimination of the very possibility of politics. […] Whether civilisation can give rise at all to any form of political life is the problem of the 21st century.

Depoliticization is the only thing the right should be serious about doing.

The profane generally imagine that Buddhists believe in the reincarnation of the soul and even in metempsychosis. This is erroneous. Buddhism teaches that the energy produced by the mental and physical activities of a being brings about the apparition of new mental and physical phenomena, when once this being has been dissolved by death. […] There exist a number of subtle theories upon this subject and the Tibetan mystics seem to have attained a deeper insight into the question that most other Buddhists. […] However, in Tibet as elsewhere, the views of the philosophers are only understood by the elite. The masses, although they repeat the orthodox creed: ‘all aggregates are impermanent; no “ego” exists in the person, nor in anything,’ remain attached to the more simple belief in an undefined entity travelling from world to world, assuming various forms. …

Israeli leaders of all major parties warn of two existential threats to Israel: a U.N. resolution forcing Israel back to the 1967 armistice line, and a nuclear-armed Iran. With Donald Trump’s election both threats have receded into the distance, and the State of Israel is more secure than it has been in its history. Yet American Jews, at least the majority of politically active Jews of high public profile, are miserable. America’s best-known Jewish conservatives—the “neocons” — have burnt their bridges to the incoming administration. It is one of the strangest, and silliest, episodes in Jewish political history. …

… 14 years of living in the United States had taken their toll. Americans since the 1960s have wanted the Brits inside the EU to counterbalance the French, whom they do not trust. I had started to think that way. But a bigger factor — I must admit it — was my personal friendship with David Cameron and George Osborne. For the first time in my career, I wrote things about which I had my doubts in order to help my friends stay in power. That was wrong and I am sorry I did it. …

Many interesting (and more substantial) points in the article. Cascade dynamics are intriguing to watch.